Many policy makers and educational researchers seem to be convinced that teaching matters. Unfortunately, such a case for teaching and teachers tends to rely on a rather one-dimensional view of what counts in education – namely the production of measurable learning outcomes – and a rather mechanistic view of what counts as education – namely teaching as an intervention that is aimed at producing particular effects. Such views about teaching and education more generally are also affecting programmes of teacher education. In this paper I raise some questions about such views about the significance of teaching, on the assumption that the future of teacher education needs to be informed by a different understanding of what teaching is and what it is for. I make a case for a multi-dimensional view of the purposes of education and for teaching as an act of communication and interpretation that always requires judgement about that ‘what’ and the ‘what for.’ Placing such judgement at the centre of teacher education suggests that the structure of the curriculum for teacher education should be spiral rather than linear-cumulative.